


thirty three

by riverbanks



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, POV Third Person Limited, Present Tense, Slipstream - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 10:38:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3407540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverbanks/pseuds/riverbanks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Survive the first thirty heartbeats, and you'll have already won.</p>
            </blockquote>





	thirty three

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the BSN's Cullen Discussion Thread 5000 pages celebration, with the prompt "Thanks for the memories!" It's ripply and disjointed and out of order, just like Cullen's memories, but that was sorta the intention. 
> 
> So proud to be part of this little corner of Cullen love! Love all ya'll.

He remembers sitting by the edge of his -not his, never his- new bunk, shoulders sagging with exhaustion but neck stiff with the wariness of one who never loses his surroundings, not nowadays, not anymore; eyes on his boots as the words fall from his lips in muted whispers.

_...the righteous, the lights in the shadow_

He remembers the footsteps and the clanking of steel, the dry cough and the eyes upon him, the tap on his feet and himself looking up, the glare of the dusty setting sun catching his eyes until all he can see is the sword and the flames before his eyes, emblazoned across the armor like a tattoo under their skin. Like a brand that marks them all as one. As all there is to them.

But most of all, clearest of all, he remembers that voice.

“Mine’s Samson. You are?”

He remembers searching for a name, for a word, for a prayer that will tell him

_who am I_

But it never comes, and the answers die on his tongue before they find the strenght to come out, and so he sits there and stares as the others pour in from the halls, filling the quarters with strained laughter and weary sighs, the familiar, same old clank-clank-clank of a dozen shields leaving heavy arms, of a dozen helmets meeting the floor, of a dozen brands burning weaker under a burst of life, even if for only a moment. Even if only until the sun rises again.

The man before him is chuckling now, shoving a stash of letters inside a worn, dusty copy of the Chant of Light, lying in his bunk with his arms under his head, a sad smile on his lips and a strange glint in his eyes that Cullen will take a lifetime to understand - if he ever does at all.

“You’ll do alright, kid.”

 

* * *

 

Her name is Moira, like every other woman her age, here and in every village across the country. Ferelden is young, and her daughters are all rebel queens, in name and in heart.

Cullen is young too, much too young to know why things are as they are, but these things he knows: Moira is a Templar, and she is a good person, the strongest person he has ever known, and she is the reason he wants to be a Templar too.

She’s not the only one, but she’s the one he’ll remember.

The Templars are there for crazy old Wilhelm, is what the villagers say. Moira says that’s not true - they’re here for everyone. And it’s true. They patrol around the town square, by the gates, they walk down to the fields and back across the lake, and since they’ve come to look after old Wilhelm, the elders say, there haven’t been any bandits on the roads, any looters in the shops, any outlaws raiding the farms and burning the crops.

But there are demons. There are whispers in the woods and shadows in the trees, noises that sound like no wolf or bear anyone’s ever heard near the caves to the West, and when Cullen’s mother tells them to stay in sight and don’t play near the mage’s house, Cullen obeys. He doesn’t know what a demon looks like when it’s eating little children, but he knows what his mother looks like when she’s cross with Mia and him.

There’s talk in town and a mood in the air, and old Wilhelm comes out less and less from his house, as the whispers grow and the fingers point. Cullen asks Moira once, if it’s true what they say. She smiles a half-smile and ruffles his hair, and says they say a lot of things.

It gets worse before it gets better. When the dogs start to disappear and a horse is found -they never tell him how it’s found, only that he’s not allowed to see it, there is a crowd in front of old Wilhelm’s, shouting things Cullen won’t understand for a few years still. Matthias watches in silence, from behind Mia’s back, as if he could make himself disappear under her shadow. Across the street, Moira and her men push back the crowd with careful, deliberate steps, hands in the air or on this and that man’s shoulders to show they mean no one any harm, but their voices are firm and their words beg no argument, and Cullen knows this too: no one will harm old Wilhelm as long as the Templars stand between the rumors and senseless slaughter.

That, right there, is when Cullen decides that he wants to be a Templar when he grows up.

She turns herself in a few days later; the baker’s daughter. Moira is showing Cullen and Mia how to grip the pommel of their wooden swords more firmly, one of the younger Templars laughing when Cullen drops his sword in the mud, and the girl is crying as she walks up their way. Moira’s smile fades and she exchanges a look with the young Templar, and before Cullen knows, he and Mia are sent home and told to stay with their father, now.

The girl goes away with the other Templars the next day, and the town is all there again to watch, but no one shouts anything this time. The baker looks cross, but the girl tells him to smile, to be happy for her. She'll learn, and she won't hurt anyone again, and she doesn't have to hide anymore.

"I told you we were here for everyone," Moira tells him, and smiles when Cullen says he wants to be just like her when he grows up. She waves at him and says they'll only be a few days, she'll come back in no time - she never does, and before he knows it father's telling them it's time to move up North where it's safer, but he never forgets her. As long as people need to be protected, he'll be strong for them just like Moira was for him.

 

* * *

 

The last ride out of the tower is the longest of his life, or at least it will be for the best of the next decade. He has crossed the lake back and forth a thousand times before, but this time Cullen finds himself sickening, his stomach twisting and the meager dinner he managed to force down threatening to come back. It’s the lull of the boat, or it’s the sound of the water, or it’s the fear of what fate lies across the shore for him, but mostly it’s the idleness of sitting and waiting and letting his mind wander. Thinking is no good for him these days.

He tries to pretend, at first, that everything is alright with him, but nothing is alright when all you can hear in the dead of night is the screaming and crying and the inhumane sounds a body can make as it’s torn apart, when all you can see is shadow and flame and fear. So he stops saying it, and since there is nothing much left to say, he soon stops speaking altogether. That’s when Greagoir knows. It’s not the tremors he can barely hide, it’s not the flash of terror in his eyes whenever something hits the floor a little harder, it’s not even the way his grip tightens around the pommel or his sword when they -or whatever’s left of them- pass him by in small groups, two or three at a time, senior enchanters on the way to dinner, children roaming the vacant quarters. It’s in the fact that he can’t talk to them anymore. He can’t talk to anyone. The other Templars don’t understand, but there is no voice left within him to explain anyway, and at the end of the day, there’s no story left to tell that anyone within these walls doesn’t know all too well. And so he shuts down, and shuts in, and that’s when the Knight-Commander tells him he needs time. Time to heal, time to forget. Time away from it all.

He’s not sure what “time” means exactly, and for a moment he’s almost about to ask, but then he sees the letter with the crimson red seal of Kirkwall on Greagoir’s desk, and he knows he’ll find out soon enough.

"It’s not fair," Carroll tells him. Cullen stares across the lake, into the pitch black of night, into nothing his eyes can really see. The boat rocks gently along the water, and he bites his tongue to keep himself from hurling on his own feet. None of this is fair.

Carroll is alright enough of a friend, an old friend, the only one he still keeps in touch with from their days of Templar training. The only friend he has left these days, after watching the rest of them be torn from limb to limb, or burned to a char, a pile of ashes in a suit of armor, or burst from the inside out, tendrils and muscles and skin stretched across the walls, so much blood he has to wonder how can he still see anything but red for the rest of his life.

But Carroll is here, and Carroll is whole, and Cullen takes small victories where he can. He was never there, and it’s a relief to be around someone who doesn’t carry that weight, for a change.

He’s the only one Cullen tells the truth to - the whole truth, not just the parts he can tell the Knight-Commander about. The demon showed him things he doesn’t want to think about, did things to him, to all of them, that Cullen can not put into words, but he tries. Carroll is not the brightest, not the most sensible friend he’ll ever have, and he doesn’t understand half the things he hears from Cullen’s mouth in stuttering half-sentences that die before they ever really go anywhere, but he _listens_ , and that’s good enough for now.

“Do you think she-”

“Don’t.”

Once they reach the docks and are finally out of the water, Cullen’s legs turn to steel and walk on their own again. He will survive this, too. He will survive anything they throw at him. He promised Mia this much, and if he has nothing left to carry with him from this tower he never wants to see again, Cullen still has his word. That’s the one thing even demons can’t take away from him.

Carroll mock-punches his arm, too weakly to even call it a jest, and tells him to keep in touch. Cullen nods and tries to smile, but it never comes, and even as he turns on his heels he knows this is the last time they will hear from each other. Perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to leave these truths with him when Cullen can hardly acknowledge them within himself - in a matter of days, none of it will matter anymore. None of this will. They are, and will always be, Templars before all else, and their duty carries more weight than a few angry tears choked back and swallowed down on a row boat, on some frigid Ferelden summer night.

The letter from Kirkwall burns a hole into his leg like hot coal through his pocket, and Cullen doesn’t look back as he walks away from everything he’s lost in the empty tower he leaves behind.

 

* * *

 

"You’re leaving."

It’s not an accusation. Not quite. Not entirely. He lips curl in an unnatural way, in what may pass for a smile were he the fooler, but he knows her better than this, or at least he’d like to think he does. It’s not an apology, either, and Cullen can hardly blame her.

Hawke is thinner than usual these days, the Guard-Captain confides in him. Spindly, gaunt, just skin and bones, she laments in that strange tone she takes on whenever Hawke is involved that reminds Cullen so much of his own mother, lamenting that Mia’s hips were not wide enough for her to keep a good husband. He wonders if Hawke takes to Aveline’s words with the same angry exasperation Mia had, but it is not his place to ask. He makes a deliberate point to not stare too long at Hawke from that point on, though. She doesn’t need this from him, too.

But she is different, and that he can tell in his own way. She seems smaller, somehow. Where her presence alone would fill an empty room before, now she ghosts before him, flickering in and out of sight like a  wraith. Her shoulders tense, her neck tight, eyes on nothing and anything, a hand that hovers over her desk idly, forgetting what it meant to do only a moment ago. She’s tired, as are them all, but the city doesn’t sleep for its viscount to rest, the world doesn’t wait for them to catch their breaths.  

He doesn’t blame Aveline, either. They are all at the end of their rope.

"I have to", she says, more to herself than to him. "I can’t… "

Cullen doesn’t need her to finish. He can’t, either. He’s lost control of them, if ever he had any. His own men, under his own nose. He stares at the letter in his hands with disgust, feeling guilt and resentment seep through his bones, and in the back of his mind he still hears the loneliness and empty echoes in her voice and begins to understand how it feels to lead, but hold no command in their hearts.

He has the evidence he needs to discharge at least half a dozen men from the already meager numbers left under his command, but it’s too late to spare Hawke the final cut now. She’s just too tired, and it’s too much, and he’s just too late. Her friends smuggled Enchanter Bethany out of the Circle last night, and Aveline is already getting her out of the Free Marches now. He supposes it’s best he doesn’t know where. Hawke has a contact, and she’ll work with him to investigate the red lyrium in places where he can’t look, if he’ll promise to do the same in the places where she can’t reach, she proposes, a hint of that same challenge she used to give him all those years ago suddenly coming back to her eyes.

He nods, taking her for her word. He does, indeed, have a lot places to look in, a lot of questions to ask. If only it had been so simple as to turn his back on his Knight-Commander, and pray the Maker would show him the way from there. He thinks of Mia again, all that hair and all that fire, staring him dead in the eye and making him say the words. "Don’t promise _me_ , you tit," she had scoffed, "promise _yourself_."

He turns to the wide open windows of her office and stares out at the sea, and in his mind he can see the shores of Amaranthine far ahead, though he knows there’s nothing but the horizon and the endless sea to watch for miles and miles off in the distance. He wonders what Ferelden looks like nowadays, as Hawke’s quiet footsteps fade towards the door. If she’s to leave town under cover and make it to Starkhaven in time, she has to leave now.

"I’ll come back," she promises him.

"I’ll be waiting," he answers; but can’t say for how long.

 

* * *

 

He tells Hawke once that he doesn't know whether he’s serving the Templars or the Knight-Commander anymore, and it’s just a weird turn of phrase at the time, an idle thought blurted out loud before he has the chance to hold it in - but it sticks with him, it grows on him like a small infection, like an itch he cannot scratch. He hears his own words, and the more he grows used to his own voice, the more he wonders if maybe he wasn’t lying after all. If maybe he was just being honest with himself, for once.

He doesn’t talk to Hawke about Meredith anymore after that, but he doesn’t talk to Meredith about Hawke anymore either. They inhabit different spaces of his life, and he doesn’t know when either of them got under his skin, but there they are, and between them he stands.

Meredith -and in private she is Meredith; they are not exactly friends, but she has given him this much- plays a wicked game of chess. She is better than Mia, in his personal ranking, although now that he knows the game, he knows all Mia ever really had on him was his childish temperament - once he learns to center himself as a Templar and look at the whole as Knight-Captain, he rarely loses a match again. Except to Meredith. She is a good strategist, has a clinical eye, and sees his every move before he makes them. She’s as intimidating staring down the chess board as she is behind her desk, looking up at him like she can read his every thought. And she probably can.

She’s teaching him, Cullen knows that. It’s Samson who first mentions it, a hushed whisper in that voice he knows so well, and Cullen tells him he’s mad, but as it turns out Samson is more lucid on a bad day than most of them in the end, and once Cullen sees it, it’s all he can see. She’s molding him. Grooming him for command, even as he questions her methods, her reasoning, even as he wonders who exactly he answers to. She sees that, too, and every now and then he catches the flash of something that’s not quite regret in her eyes when she has to take back from his hands a decision he’s not yet ready to make.

_One day, you’ll understand._

Her hands are shaking, and she tries to keep them still in her lap, but he sees it whenever she reaches for a piece on the board. Cullen frowns at her, but Meredith doesn’t acknowledge him. He would curse her damned stubborn pride, if he didn’t know himself better.

"Should we look into that?" he murmurs into his hand, low enough that the walls can’t hear it. He doesn’t want to say the words lest it makes them real, and this is not something they talk about. None of them. Ever. But she needs more. Longer rations, or more frequent. This is not the first sign. She’s been scratching her ears when she thinks he’s not looking, pressing her eyelids to remember the rest of her sentences, and now this. The lyrium is starting to take her, inch by inch, and the only way to drown out the noise is with more of the same. He needs to adjust her rations, and speak with the quartermaster about the officer stocks.

He expects her to rebuff him, to glare at him with those ice cold eyes of hers until he has to apologize for forgetting himself and pretend he hasn’t seen anything, but she doesn’t. She stares at the white Queen on the board, her eyes shadowed in weakness that only one who has been her right hand for seven years now knows, and her voice betrays what he has known of her for a long time now when she says, "Yes, perhaps we should."

He does understand. He knows what it takes.

Turning the black King over on the board, he rises to help Meredith from her chair. This time she does scoff at him, a slight smirk playing upon her lips that doesn’t fully realize, and Cullen smiles and falls one step behind her. He follows the Knight-Commander back into her office, and quietly runs a list of names through his mind, wondering to himself if any of their current men might make a decent Knight-Captain one day.

 

* * *

 

Blood runs down his lips and into his mouth as Cullen holds his face in shock.

Samson is raving, shouting madness into the night that Cullen can’t even hear as his ears drum with the need, with the _thirst_. He looks around frantically, expecting the rest of them to come running from every shadow, swords raised with the righteous grief of the betrayed, but nobody comes, and Cullen knows then, if he’s never known it before, that he never mattered at all. He was just the ghost walking in her footsteps.

The man drops to his knees in front of him, weeping openly now, the blade still in his hands, still dripping with his Commander’s blood, sobbing half words and noises of agony and rage and _thirst_ at him, but Cullen barely registers his presence anymore as the taste of blood fills his mouth, the pain sets in and his face burns like it’s been torn in half - it finally dawns on him that it has.

_You swore you'd never give up._

Cullen’s made a lot of promises in his life, and he realizes now he’s never been very good at keeping them.

The bolt hisses past his hip and lodges into Samson’s shoulder, and it’s all Cullen can do to turn around and shout out a _No!_ that comes out more like a bloody cough. He signals them to stop, and Cassandra halts her jog for a moment as Varric puts the crossbow down. It only takes her a squint under the bright night lamps of the Hightown streets to see his sorry state, though, and Cassandra dashes towards him with renewed fury.

Cullen steps in front of Samson before she can cut him down, and he sees the man now. Really sees him. Samson’s face is twisted in pain and thirst and a torment he doesn’t know but understands all too well, a miserable heap of sobs bleeding all over the fancy tiles, hands still clutching the knife like it’s the only thing keeping him together.

His eyes are red.

Cullen leans on Cassandra, losing his balance for a moment as the drumming in his ears and the bleeding from his face take the best of him, and lets her drag him away. From Samson, from Kirkwall, from the Templars. From everything he knows and has ever been, and towards whatever lies ahead. Whatever he needs to learn how to be again.

He’ll live through this, too.

 

* * *

 

Barris is bright and young and full of life and full of dreams, and Cullen doesn’t know what to make of him. He remembers _being_ young, but never _feeling_ the same youth in his bones.

It’s Lady Trevelyan’s strange notion to grant him a title that is as devoid of meaning as anything else the sorry remnants of the Order does these days, but she is adamant about it, and counts on Cassandra’s support. He tries to ask Cassandra to reconsider these pointless theatrics, but she only shakes her head at him. “You won’t understand, Commander.”

“And you don’t have to,” she adds with a smile as she leaves his office.

But he does understand. Even if means nothing to him now, it meant something once, and so he goes along with the ceremony, playing his part as he must and even enjoying the bright enthusiasm in their faces, the promise of something he one day dreamt of too. He has a different part to play now, but it’s easy to get caught up in promises and hope -pray- that this time they will fare better than he did.

He keeps a certain distance from Barris and his men, still. It’s better for him and for them to think of these Templars that Trevelyan rescued from Therinfall like stray pups from the streets of Denerim as soldiers like any other, and leave the politics of it for those that can play the game. The Inquisitor and her ambassador do a fine job of salvaging the Order’s reputation where they can, Cassandra keeps them in line with not much more than her title as a Seeker, and he’s in charge of training them and sending them off to be Templars where Templars are still needed.

“I don’t know what it means to be their Knight-Commander,” Barris confesses one day, as they are riding out to meet with the rest of them down the road that leads into the old Imperial Highway. “I know it’s important to them, but I don’t know what to do with this.”

Cullen glances at him, surprised by the honesty, if not the sentiment. He’s not used to people just saying the things they mean to say, and it’s a refreshing change.

“I couldn’t tell you,” he answers, watching the sunrise play colors upon the snow. “My own term as one ended with the men under my command smuggling red lyrium right under my nose, and a former friend shoving a knife up my face.”

Barris stares at him for a long moment, searching for something that isn’t there, for wisdom he’s never had, for answers that Cullen’s never found even for himself, and it breaks his heart just a little bit to see the same realization dawn on the boy’s face.

“I can tell you one thing, however,” and he rides his horse in front of Barris’ and finally looks him in the eye, for the first time since they’ve met. “There is such a thing as a price too high to pay.”

“I know what it takes,” Barris says, meeting his gaze with the same challenge Cullen once levelled at Meredith. He bites back a bitter smirk that threatens to come out at the thought that the more he runs from her, the more he understands her in turn - just as she said he would. This is not a joke to the boy -man- laying bare his pride before him, before the one person in this Inquisition who most tries to run from such a mirror of himself lest he sees his own reflection.

“If it takes more than you can give, then it’s not worth it,” he closes, turning his horse around and spurring it forward. “You’re worth better than that.”

He can see the Sword of Mercy embroidered in the new banners down the road, and the red of their old, weathered tents, and as the young Knights approach them with greetings and bows showing respect he doesn’t feel he deserve, an old itch settles in Cullen and he sends for a runner to send word back to Skyhold. He will ride with his Templars for the day.

 

* * *

 

He takes one look at her and knows that Hawke is Hawke again. She’s cut her hair and put on weight and caught a tan on the road, and she carries herself with the old determination of one who refuses to bend, fills up the room like she’s the only thing worth looking at again. She is calmer and she is slower and she is older, as are they all, but this is the Hawke he remembers.

“You didn’t come back.”

She turns around warily at the sound of his voice, and breaks into the brightest smile he’s seen anyone give him in years. She jumps into his arms and Cullen has to let go of all protocol and circumstance for a moment - he’s glad to see her again too.

“You didn’t wait,” she laughs into his ear, and Cullen laughs too, even as he puts her back down.

He wants to apologize for something, but isn't sure what. She sees right through him, and gives that _look_ of hers, the one that tells him she'll punch him right in the face if he tries, and it's hard not to laugh. Her face softens for a moment as she seems to realize something, and Cullen bites the side of his tongue, wondering how to tell her about Samson. He was her project in the end, her and her ever forgiving heart and her fixation with second chances. She and Trevelyan are two of a kind, he's told her as much before, and he can only pray that the Inquisitor's judgement proves less disastrous than the Champion's in the long run.

"You're laughing."  
  
Cullen raises an eyebrow at her, losing his train of thought.

"I've never seen you laugh," she tells him, her voice wistful like she's seeing the ocean for the first time.

He's blushing now, he knows it, and the sound that comes from him is anything between a cough and chuckle. But she's not wrong. He doesn't remember laughing in Kirkwall, not even once. Not even on the good days, few and far between as they were. But he laughs now. Blackwall tells a good joke, and he laughs. Varric gives him nicknames, and he laughs. Trevelyan embarrasses him in front of his fellow advisors, and he laughs along. He laughs now for all the years that he couldn't, that the idea of laughter didn't live within him, and if he feels light headed and dizzy and needs to sit down and readjust sometimes after laughing too much, no one says anything. He's swimming through a sea of emotions he'd forgotten for so long in a fog of blue and the drumming -always the drumming- that it feels like coming alive again, and he knows he's lucky to have friends to hold him up as he learns to walk again. He's only sorry Hawke was never there to be a part of it.

"I have something to tell you," he smirks at her. "You'll want to sit down for this."

Hawke's face falters a bit, and she runs a hand through her shorter hair. "Yes, Varric told me about Samson."

He's not surprised. "Yes, there's that. But this is not about him," and he takes her hand and forces her to sit. "It's about me."

Hawke's face is worth a portrait, and Cullen can only laugh.

 

* * *

  
He's not expecting anything different, but it still hurts him in places he didn't know could hurt as he reads through Leliana's reports to find what's become of his memories, of the things he still remembers and holds somewhat dear, if maybe in retrospect. Dead. Missing. Dead. Dead. Killed in the mage war. Killed in the Blight. Disappeared in Seheron. Last seen in the Anderfels. Dead.

Moira has been missing in action for ten years now. Knowing the fate of every small time village in Southern Ferelden at the time, he can only guess she died throwing herself at darkspawn to save some starry-eyed boy like himself, and her body was never found. It would be just like her, some glorious sacrifice to protect the innocent. It was all his eight year old self had ever aspired to be.

And then there's Carroll. He's not dead, not technically, but from what he's seen of those behemoths before, he might as well be.

He considers going himself -he's going after Samson if he has to catch him with his bare hands- but this is different. Samson was his own failure. His own lesson to learn. Carroll was just... Carroll. Crude, barely literate Carroll, who talked about the tavern girl's breasts and shared baked goods from the village with him on long nights. Who had rowed that boat all the way from the tower to the shore as Cullen sat there feeling only halfway alive, and tucked shortbreads into his bag and waved goodbye with a smile, even as Cullen walked away and never turned back.

He starts to wonder what might have been if he'd only written those letters after all, but he knows this is a dangerous path and stops himself short of fantasy. He leaves a short note on Lady Trevelyan's desk instead, and retires to the chapel for the evening. The Maker never answers, but there's no one else left to ask.

She comes back a few weeks later, and from her hesitation to speak to him or look at him across the war table, Cullen knows it is done. She comes up to his office later at night, teasing him about working late as she always does, but there's no mirth in the jest. He drops the reports he hasn't been reading for hours anyway, and pours them whatever's nearest. The soft clink of their glasses resounds in the silence of the battlements at this hour, and continues to ring in his ears longer than comfortable. He rubs his neck, trying to decide how much he truly wants to know.

She leans against the edge of his desk, sipping her drink in silence and staring at her own feet. Probably wondering how much she should tell him. 

A small sigh leaves him, and she looks up. He once told Carroll the truth. The whole truth, not just the parts that can be talked about. He hasn't told anyone else those other parts again - not even her. He owes rough, dense old Carroll at least this much.

"Tell me."

 

* * *

 

"You don't disagree," she says, pointedly stating the obvious.

He stands at attention beside her, watching the procession of mounted chevaliers cross the gates. "I don't," he concedes. "But I am not the one who will fight this battle for you."

Cassandra scoffs, the carefully trained neutral expression on her face faltering for just a moment before she is stone again, before Cassandra is gone and she is Divine Victoria carved in marble.

"It will be a monumental task to rebuild the Templar Order from the ashes where it scarcely stands," she says, her voice a trained monotone that make his ears itch, for some strange reason.

He nods, restraining his own smirk for only a second before he remembers he owes no one here anything. Not anymore. "Indeed. And you shall count on the support of every faithful Templar who hasn't abandoned the Order for some reason or another of their own. But that, as you well know, is not me."

She turns to him, her face tight with exasperation, and just like that the mask is gone. "I do not ask you to-"

"I know," he says simply, bowing once and stepping down from the pulpit as the Sisters pour in to fret over her, scold her for breaking posture, and begin the rehearsal again. Cassandra ignores them, still following him with that familiar glare he's learned to take in stride as he walks down the aisle towards the doors, where Lady Trevelyan and Knight-Commander Barris watch the ordeal from afar. He joins them, shrugging the question in Trevelyan's eyes. He's gone over this too many times, and has no mood to start it over with either of them.

"Divine Victoria would have a word, Knight-Commander."

Barris gasps for air once, twice, but with a look of encouragement from both the Inquisitor and her Commander, he finds his nerve to move and steps up to where the Most Holy struggles with the lot of young Sisters fretting over her robes.

"You don't disagree," Trevelyan says, and Cullen barks a laugh louder than he intends.

"I stand with your cause, my Lady. And Most Holy's. I still believe in what the Templars were _meant_ to be, and maybe with Divine Victoria's guidance, they will yet become something I will not regret having aspired to." He runs both hands through his hair, running them down to his ears and the nape of his neck. "But I choose my battles now, and this is one I'm no longer interested in fighting."

She smiles only a half-smile, something that is neither here nor there, but these are the only answers Cullen has to give, and they will have to suffice for now. He extends his arm with a genuine smile of his own, not an apology -not again, not ever again- but a truce, and she takes it, using his weight to level her descent down the long stairways of the catedral, her feet wobbling slightly in the atrociously ugly and impossibly high shoes Leliana gave her for the occasion.

"And what of the day the Inquisition ends," she asks with the usual mocking smile he is far more familiar with. "What will you fight for, then?"

Cullen shrugs, the sun warm on his face now. "I'm sure my father could still use a pair of hands in the ploughs."

 

* * *

 

There's a steady clank of steel and a low voice in prayer as he approaches the cells, and he remembers.

_...the righteous, the lights in the shadow_

Samson still remains where Cullen last saw him the time before, and the time before that, and the time before that. Leaning his head against the bars of his cell, drumming the tip of his shackles against the steel, watching the waterfall disappear into white mist for miles below them. Reciting the Chant from beginning to end, and back again, and again, until his voice is little more than a hoarse whisper.

He never moves, and he never sleeps, and he never stops, the jailkeeper says. They've moved the other prisoners inside, lest he drives them mad too.

Cullen approaches, like he has before, but this time he doesn't ask any questions. He doesn't shout, and he doesn't throw accusations, and he doesn't look for answers that were never there. He sits by the ledge, backing himself against the wall as the emptyness of the open air behind him pulls at his limbs. He draws his legs up against his chest, and watches. Samson, and then his crystal, and then the water. It never ends.

"Do you ever tire of feeling sorry for yourself?"

Samson stops, and the clank of his last tap echoes in the air, filling the space around them with a buzz that drowns out the other one, in his own ears. He chuckles low in his throat, and looks down at his own chest. There's a large red lyrium crystal sprouting from where Samson's heart should rightfully be, and Cullen doesn't want to know how the man is even still alive anymore. The brand still burns beneath, the sword that marked them as one but has never delivered anything close to mercy upon them all.

"Do you?"

He stands, giving up on this charade once and for all. Once, he would have tried harder. He would have tried everything. Now, it doesn't matter anymore. There's nothing left here for him, for either of them.

He's leaving, going back to his life away from this, closing the door on this memory, and may the void take it with the rest of his sanity if needed be, when he hears that voice -always that voice- call out from behind him one last time.

"You did alright, kid."


End file.
